The Scent of Rain & Lightning (2017)

17 Saturday Feb 2018

Tags

Blake Robbins, Drama, Literary adaptation, Maggie Grace, Maika Monroe, Mark Webber, Murder, Revenge, Review, Thriller, Will Patton

D: Blake Robbins / 103m

Cast: Maika Monroe, Mark Webber, Will Patton, Maggie Grace, Justin Chatwin, Bonnie Bedelia, Aaron Poole, Brad Carter, Logan Miller, Kassia Conway, Sarah Noble Peck

A small town murder mystery with an arthouse feel, The Scent of Rain & Lightning opens with bad news for Jody Linder (Monroe): Billy Croyle (Carter), the man who was jailed for killing her parents, Laurie and Hugh (Grace, Chatwin), twelve years before has had his sentence commuted and is being released from prison. Understandably, Jody and the rest of her family – grandfather ‘Senior’ (Patton), grandmother Annabelle (Bedelia), uncles Chace (Webber) and Meryl (Poole) – aren’t too happy about this, but when Jody confronts Croyle and he accuses ‘Senior’ of getting the verdict he wanted, as well as denying he killed her parents, Jody begins to ask questions around town, questions that make her believe that not everything about her parents’ deaths is as cut and dried as she’s been led to believe. As the town – and her family – start to give up their secrets, Jody is forced to accept that the answers she’s looking for may lie closer to home. But then a senseless act of violence occurs, one that puts Jody in danger, and which threatens her family as well…

A slow burn thriller that looks and feels like an arthouse movie, The Scent of Rain & Lightning (adapted from the novel of the same name by Nancy Pickard) doesn’t offer anything new for viewers with a liking for small town murder mysteries, but it does provide a non-linear narrative that interweaves Jody’s somewhat random approach to investigating her parents’ deaths, with flashbacks to the events that led up to the murders, and finally, what actually happened. These flashbacks are necessary, as Jody proves to be the Rick Deckard of small town murder mysteries, and never learns anything of real value. Thankfully, while she’s looking for answers, the script by Casey Twenter and Jeff Robison (also two of the movie’s producers) keeps the viewer up to speed with what happened, why, how, and who was responsible. It makes for an uneven narrative, with neither strand complementing each other, or finding common moments where they might connect effectively, and as a result, it’s a movie that often feels like it’s been stitched together Frankenstein Monster-style, with no clear idea of which part goes with which. This also leaves some scenes feeling a little lost, or there just to pad out the running time.

Performance-wise, the movie is a bit of a mixed bag also. None of the characters are particularly well developed, and Jody’s expected character arc fizzles out around two thirds in. Monroe, a very talented young actress who’s still looking for that perfect follow up to her breakout role in It Follows (2014), hasn’t much to do beyond ask awkward questions and have those questions go unanswered. As the movie progresses, her role diminishes further and further, and the need to solve the mystery takes precedence. This brings Grace’s character to the fore, but Laurie and her secret prove to be very stereotypical, which leaves any emotional connection the viewer might be looking to make as unlikely as Kevin Spacey winning a Best Supporting Actor award at this year’s Oscars. Elsewhere, the likes of Patton, Bedelia and Poole flit in and out of the narrative, while Webber struggles to make his character ambivalent enough to be considered a viable suspect. Robbins, making his second feature (and appearing as the town sheriff), opts for a muted visual style that is at least atmospheric, but which doesn’t elevate the material, and there are too many occasions where the image is refracted through water as if it has an important psychological resonance.

Rating: 5/10 – with two narrative strands that work independently of each other, and a sense that no amount of screenplay jiggery-pokery could have brought them together, The Scent of Rain & Lightning lacks the impact needed to make its mystery elements work, and its small town milieu appropriately claustrophobic; disappointing then – though not unwatchable – it’s another indie thriller that tries hard to be different while forgetting that it’s using very basic materials to begin with.

Laggies (2014)

13 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Chloë Grace Moretz, Drama, Elopement, Engagement, Keira Knightley, Lynn Shelton, Mark Webber, Relationships, Review, Romance, Sam Rockwell, Single father

aka Say When

D: Lynn Shelton / 99m

Cast: Keira Knightley, Chloë Grace Moretz, Sam Rockwell, Mark Webber, Jeff Garlin, Ellie Kemper, Sara Coates, Kirsten deLohr Helland, Kaitlyn Dever, Daniel Zovatto, Dylan Arnold, Gretchen Mol

At twenty-six, Megan (Knightley) still doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life. She helps out her dad (Garlin) with his store, but otherwise does little beyond spend time with her friends, or her boyfriend, Anthony (Webber). When her friend Allison (Kemper) gets married, the day of the wedding proves traumatic when Anthony proposes to her unexpectedly and Megan sees her father fooling around with another woman. Unable to deal with the two events, she leaves the reception and drives around until she stops at a convenience store. There she’s stopped by a young girl, Annika (Moretz) and asked if she’ll buy alcohol for her and her friends. Megan agrees, and ends up spending the next few hours with them.

When she eventually gets back home, Anthony reveals that he thinks they should forgo a big wedding and elope to Las Vegas. Megan agrees that they should, but she still has qualms about getting married, and uses a trip to a planned careers advice seminar to delay their marriage for a week. Her idea is to give herself the space and time to decide if she wants to spend the rest of her life with Anthony. As she leaves Seattle, Megan receives a phone call from Annika asking if she can pose as her mother for a meeting with a school guidance counsellor. Megan does so, and asks Annika if, in return, she can stay with her for the upcoming week.

Annika is fine with the idea but knows her father, Craig (Rockwell), will be less enthusiastic about it, but Annika’s attempt to sneak Megan into the house fails, and Megan ends up being questioned by Craig – who’s a lawyer – about why she’s there. Megan lies and tells him she’s between apartments due to lease problems, and just needs somewhere to stay temporarily. Craig lets her stay, and as the week progresses he begins to trust her. So does Annika, so much so that she asks Megan to go with her to see her estranged mother, Bethany (Mol).

Craig and Megan spend an evening together at a bar and on their way home begin kissing. They have sex when they get home; next morning Craig offers to let Megan stay longer, but she reluctantly tells him she has to leave. They kiss again and this time Annika sees them. She later tells Megan that she doesn’t have a problem if they got together, but when they go shopping for a prom dress for Annika, Annika discovers Megan’s engagement ring. Forced to admit the truth, Megan’s deception proves to have lasting consequences…

After the disappointment of her previous movie, Touchy Feely (2013), hopes were high that Lynn Shelton’s next project would be an improvement, and re-cement her position as one of today’s more intriguing and perceptive directors. Working from a script by first-time screenwriter Andrea Siegel, Laggies – the phrase refers to people who are always late or lagging behind in some way – Shelton has certainly made a better feature than her last, but it’s still a movie that suffers from a lack of conviction.

Part of the problem is the central character of Megan, a young woman apparently experiencing a “quarter-life crisis”. While it’s not improbable for anyone to find themselves in their mid-twenties and without a clear idea of where their life is heading, where Megan is concerned it’s very clear that she’s an intelligent, independently-minded young woman, but someone who is unable to deal with the larger, more important aspects of becoming an adult. She avoids responsibility and appears emotionally shallow, but somehow manages to retain the affection and support of everyone around her. How she’s arrived at this point is never explained, and the movie never explores fully the implications of such an arrested lifestyle, preferring instead to have Megan float through her own life waiting for the answers to come to her rather than working them out for herself.

With Megan having little in the way of self-awareness (or even pride), it’s difficult to fully sympathise with her, especially when she falls for Craig so easily, a plot development that couldn’t have been signposted better if it had been written in fiery letters in the sky. It’s this conventional romantic approach that anchors the movie’s second half and leads to the kind of unsurprising resolution that’s been seen a million times before. That Shelton manages to keep the viewer interested despite all this is a tribute to her skills as a director, and the performance of Knightley, who adopts not only a convincing American accent, but also fleshes out the character of Megan against all the odds. There’s a scene after Megan has slept with Craig where she talks with her father; unable to judge him anymore, Megan’s lack of ambivalence over her own actions further hurts the scene, and it’s only rescued by Knightley’s decision to play it with a sense of newly discovered regret at the way she’s acted towards him.

Moretz is sidelined by the script’s insistence on her being a constant reminder of the simpler life Megan is looking for, while Rockwell brings his usual quirky schtick to a character who really needs to be more conservative, and not an older, wiser version of Megan. Spare a thought for Webber, though, playing a character so wet and puppy like you can only think Megan’s with him out of a sense of obligation, or worse, pity. With its four main characters either stretching credulity or in place to meet the wider needs of the storyline, the movie feels and sounds like an examination of a particularly callow way of living, and one that most of us would have little time for.

On the plus side, Shelton does make more of the material than it deserves, and she invests the movie with a rhythm that helps the viewer get through some of the more unlikely moments. Knightley dials down most of her usual mannerisms to give a polished portrayal of a lost soul who’d prefer to remain that way, and Mol deserves a mention for making Annika’s mother something more than the standard embittered ex-wife. Nat Sanders’ editing is another plus, especially when called upon to enhance a character’s emotional reaction in a scene, and there’s an often delightfully apt score by Benjamin Gibbard that subtly reflects Megan’s confusion.

Rating: 6/10 – while the movie’s structure is fairly sound, and Shelton shows an awareness of the script’s faults that compensates greatly, Laggies still feels undercooked, and as a result, falls short of what it’s aiming for; while it’s refreshing to see a woman in her mid-twenties having a life crisis, it’s also a shame to find said crisis left mostly unexplored.

Jessabelle (2014)

27 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ghost, Horror, Joelle Carter, Kevin Greutert, Louisiana, Mark Webber, Review, Sarah Snook, Tarot cards, Thriller, Wheelchair bound

D: Kevin Greutert / 90m

Cast: Sarah Snook, Joelle Carter, Mark Webber, David Andrews, Ana de la Reguera, Amber Stevens, Chris Ellis

Following a car accident that kills her fiancé and leaves her paralysed from the waist down, Jessie (Snook) goes to recuperate at what was her parents’ house but is now just her dad’s, her mother (Carter) having died from cancer when Jessie was very young. She’s given her mother’s room, and settles in, but her dad (Andrews) is distant and not very supportive. One day, Jessie discovers a number of old video tapes in a box labelled “Jessabelle”. When she plays one she finds herself watching her mother playing with a deck of Tarot cards and talking to “Jessabelle”. Jessie thinks her mother means her, but some of what she says doesn’t relate to Jessie at all. When her dad finds out about the tape he gets angry and destroys it; he also throws her wheelchair into the nearby lake.

The next day he apologises and gives Jessie her mother’s old wheelchair so that she can still get about. When he goes out she watches another tape; on it her mother mentions a man named Moses. On the next day, Jessie is helped into a bath by a physiotherapist. She falls asleep, and the bath begins to fill with blood. When Jessie wakes she finds the ghost of a girl a few years younger than her in the bath with her. The ghost (Stevens) attacks Jessie but when she screams and her dad bursts in, the ghost disappears, as if it was all an hallucination. Her dad finds the other tape and tries to burn both of them but he gets locked in his shed and burns to death.

At her dad’s funeral, Jessie is reunited with an old flame, Preston (Webber). She confides in him about the tapes, and although he’s married he promises to help her as much as he can. Jessie later finds more tapes, one of which contains her mother telling “Jessabelle” that she’s already dead. Things take a strange turn when Jessie and Preston discover an infant’s grave in the bayou, an infant named Jessabelle. They alert the police and the remains are taken away to be examined. Jessie and Preston also discover a shrine to the man known as Moses but are warned away from it. Echoes of the past begin to reveal themselves, and soon Jessie learns the truth about Jessabelle and her parents, and a terrible crime that was committed before she was born.

While Jessabelle attempts to bring something new to the sins of the past sub-genre of horror movies, regular viewers of this sort of thing will find it commendably low-key and sadly unambitious at the same time. The source of most viewers’ consternation will be Robert Ben Garant’s screenplay, his first proper outing in the horror field (he also wrote Hell Baby (2013) but that was more of a horror-comedy hybrid – and didn’t work in either department). Garant is better known as the writer/creator of the Night at the Museum movies, as well as being an actor, but on this occasion his enthusiasm for trying to tell a ghost story that isn’t as derivative as all the rest, is the one thing that actually gets him – and the movie – into trouble.

From the moment Jessie arrives at her childhood home it’s clear that her dad’s behaviour towards her is borne out of guilt over something he’s done in the past, and while this type of relationship isn’t exactly unusual in horror movies, here it’s more awkward than usual thanks to the script’s refusal to portray him as anything other than angry and scornful – which in light of what we discover he’s done, actually makes him appear self-deluded and cruel; it also makes the viewer wonder why Jessabelle’s vengeful spirit hasn’t killed him already. The mother’s appearance is problematic as well, her graduation from early video blogger to phantom presence in the movie’s final quarter being needed not to provide any unexpected scares but to explain the plot amid a welter of artless exposition.

The answer to the mystery of Jessabelle and the tapes Jessie’s mother recorded, when it comes, is as underwhelming as the relationship between Jessie and Preston, an attempt at romance that even stops the plot long enough for them to end up between the sheets. The clues that lead to the discovery of Jessabelle’s identity are so heavily signposted it’s like playing connect-the-dots (and there’s only three dots to be connected). Again, Garant’s script wants to appear more clever than it is, but lets itself down time after time with weak scares and even weaker plot developments (experienced viewers will have worked out what’s going on long before Jessabelle shows up in the bath).

Things aren’t helped by Greutert’s disinterested direction, nor Michael Fimognari’s pedestrian camerawork, reducing the beautiful North Carolina locations to gloomy backdrops. The performances aren’t that convincing either, with only Snook offering anything like a commitment to her character, making Jessie far more sympathetic than she has any right to be (she’s the most likeable character in a movie that makes it extra hard to root for anyone). And with an ending that is as predictable as it is entirely derivative, Jessabelle winds up disappointing far more than it entertains.

Rating: 3/10 – stupid is as stupid does – a phrase that applies to so many horror movies that it’s embarrassing, and Jessabelle does nothing to avoid being added to the list; despite Garant’s efforts this is dispiriting stuff indeed, and with only Snook’s performance to warrant a viewing, can be consigned to the so-bad-it’s-bad list of recent horror movies without a moment’s hesitation.